Last week on June 14, President Obama announced his economic plan to finally bring economic recovery and growth to the U.S. in a much ballyhooed address in Cleveland. He threw down the gauntlet to Mitt Romney on the issue, saying “more than anything else, this election presents a choice between two fundamentally different visions of how to create strong sustained growth; how to pay down our long term debt; and most of all, how to generate good, middle-class jobs….”

Truer words have never been spoken by the President. So let’s examine the two fundamentally different visions and see which can produce strong sustained growth, pay down our long term debt, and generate good, middle class jobs.

Under President Obama’s plan, on January 1 of next year the top tax rates of virtually every major federal tax will increase, as already enacted under current law. That is because the tax increases of Obamacare would go into effect, and the Bush tax cuts would expire, which Obama refuses to renew for singles making over $200,000 a year, and couples making over $250,000. The English translation of that target for the tax increases is the nation’s small businesses, job creators and investors.

As a result, with the Bush tax cuts just expiring for these targeted taxpayers, the top 2 income tax rates would jump by nearly 20%, the capital gains tax would soar by nearly 60%, the tax on dividends would nearly triple, the Medicare payroll tax would skyrocket by 62% for the above disfavored taxpayers, and the top death tax rate would rise from the grave to 55%.

That is all on top of the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world at nearly 40%; counting the federal corporate rate of 35% and state corporate rates on average. But under Obama, there is no relief in sight. Instead, Obama is pushing still more tax increases. Under his proposed Buffett rule, the capital gains tax rate would increase by 100%, and would be the fourth highest in the industrialized world. Many OECD countries, in fact, impose no capital gains tax because it is just another layer of taxation on capital income on top of the corporate and individual income taxes. All of this would leave American businesses uncompetitive in the global economy.

How is this going to produce strong sustained growth and generate good middle class jobs? It is going to do just the opposite, as the multiple tax rate increases would only sharply reduce the incentive for productive activities, such as savings, investment, business expansion, business start ups, and job creation. That will simply encourage even more capital flight from the U.S., and a continued capital strike by the capital that remains. All this translates into yet another recession next year, with fewer jobs, rising unemployment, and soaring deficits and debt. This does not signal Obama fighting for the middle class; instead it points to him trashing the economic chances of the very voters whose favor he seeks.

The alternative GOP vision is spelled out in the budget produced by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, which was passed by the Republican controlled House, and is supported by Romney. That includes individual tax reform closing loopholes and reducing tax rates to 25% for couples earning over $100,000 per year, and 10% for those making less, and corporate tax reform slashing crony capitalist loopholes and reducing the 35% federal rate to an internationally competitive 25%. And then the aforementioned Obama tax increases would be repealed. CBO has scored these tax reforms as restoring federal revenues to their long term, postwar, historical average from 1948 to 2008 of 18.5% of GDP.

The reduced tax rates under such reform would produce exactly the opposite results of Obama’s tax rate increases, increasing incentives for all of the above productive activities. That would restore traditional American prosperity and job creation as a result.

But in his speech in Cleveland, Obama opposed tax reform that would lower rates and close loopholes. He said it would be a tax increase on the middle class. The problem for Obama is that Ryan’s tax reform plan does not involve any tax increase for the middle class. His plan cuts tax rates for every taxpayer, including those in the middle class. And that has always been the Republican position.

President Reagan cut tax rates across the board for everyone, including the middle class, and expanded the personal exemption, which benefits middle and lower income taxpayers the most. President Bush cut tax rates for everyone, and for lower income workers by a greater proportion than for higher income workers. As a result, by 2007, before President Obama had even entered office, official IRS data showed that the middle 20% of all income earners, the true middle class, paid only 4.7% of all federal income taxes.

If you have a basic understanding of economics, free market economic principles, and can think critically and logically, then his is a walk in the park.

If not, you are probably an Obama voter, and will be yet again.

_________________Nothing is going to startle us more when we pass through the veil to the other side than to realize how well we know our Father [in Heaven] and how familiar his face is to us

- President Ezra Taft Benson

I am so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

Yes, we're supposed to believe that the vast majority of economists, with the exception of a few anti-Government nutjobs, have absolutely no understanding of basic economic principles. Yes, that makes a lot of sense doesn't it? Even economists who worked for Reagan, Bush, McCain, they're all too stupid to understand that supply side economic theory really did work! Even Alan Greenspan, an Ayn Rand disciple, was too stupid to understand this as well when he testified before congress that his economic world view was proved wrong. Markets don't regulate themselves, as the Right wing myth goes.

Face it Droops, you lost. Your preferred economic theory was employed for too long and it proved devastating. The near collapse of the economy was due to 8 years of Reaganomics and 12 years of the Bush's. The only bright spot in between those periods was during the Clinton administration.

You're not going to be able to rewrite history to suit your fantasy, no matter how many fancy words and convoluted sentence structures you adopt.

Every time we pin you down on specifics (as krose has done) you disappear and then eventually shoot back with long cut and pasted articles that usually don't even pertain to what we've said. You're a fraud Droops. Stop pretending to have a grasp on those "basic economic principles." You follow a fringe group of economists, not because you grasp their arguments or basic economic principles. You devote yourself to them because they're the only chance you have to further your bigotry based agenda from the economic angle.

_________________"I Learned More at McDonald's Than at College." - ldsfaqs

One of the things that some people constantly complain about is the STATUTORY corporate tax rate, which IS high.

The dirty little secret they neglect to mention is that because of all of the deductions allowed, the EFFECTIVE tax rate for United State Corporations is pretty much the same as the rest of the OECD.

_________________"I am more Presidential than anybody, other than the great Abraham Lincoln."- Donald Trump"[Trump] will go down as the greatest president ever in American history."- Maxine (Ajax) Waters"History is a process of rebarbarization."- Will DurantStrange Fruit